Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The dream started by rewinding to yesterday. I was doing something and suddenly realized it was a minute past sixteen and I hadn't moved my car back to my side of the street. I ran downstairs but it had already been towed. I spent awhile running around, saying, "It's got to be here somewhere! I just forgot exactly where I parked it, right?" Oddly, other cars that had been left on that side of the street had been moved up onto the sidewalk instead of being impounded. (Also oddly, there were a convnience store and a donut shop and some other business on that side of the street.) I fretted and angsted and wondered how I would get the money to get my car back, and thought that now getting to see anniemal would be even more difficult. Depressed, I went back inside, wondering how they'd managed to tow my car away and rearrange all the others in a single minute. When I got back inside, I noticed that instead of being a minute past sixteen, like I'd thought, it was really a minute to seventeen.

The floor plan of my house had changed, but it seemed normal at the time. There was a long hallway on the second floor, or maybe the third, and an extra kitchen on the second floor. And I owned more chairs. I was trying to decide where to hang art while still worrying about my car and feeling too embarrassed to tell anyone it had gotten towed. My house wasn't the only one with a shifted architecture: the roof styles of neighbouring houses had changed. Next door had a conical peak like I see in NW Baltimore but not down here in SoWeBo. There was a hole in the roof, and I saw people -- potential buyers and a real estate agent, I think, step out of the hole and walk around the flattish part that surrounded it. They stared at me through the picture window on my third floor (another detail my house doesn't have when I'm awake, though the windows do lack mullions ...) then went back in through the hole in the roof. Oddly, everything felt like New York City while I was watching them, even though it mostly still looked like Baltimore (except that maybe the houses were half again as tall).

Suddenly I was at Pennsic, but the geography was a little different -- a lot flatter, with a lot of trees on the Serengetti and fewer trees between the barn and the lake, and Brewer's Road was over near Runestone. We were camped a little south of the barn (about where Oddessey Coffee is in real life, but the big slope just south of that was flat) instead of our usual spot. There was something I was supposed to go to -- a battle I was planning to photograph, or a dance or something -- that I wasn't sure how I would get to since my car had been towed [for folks unfamiliar with Pennsic: at the waking version of Pennsic I walk everywhere I need to go on site, so needing my car is another of those funny dream changes.]. There was a small, single story motel on site, near Chandler's Road and Dragon Trace, and a friend was having a room party. Actually, the party was wrapping up, and she said she had to go back to mundania for the next few days, so I should grab some of the leftover munchies to save her the trouble of carrying them back (where she would leave them in the break room at her office or something).

When I came out of the motel room, juggling my guitar and an armload of snack foods and pastries, the weather looked kind of brown. Confused, I scanned the horizon and saw a tornado approaching from the south. "That's not good," I thought, followed by, "Wait, we never get tornadoes at Pennsic, just tornado-scares." Then, "I should run, but I'm not sure where to go, and it looks like it's still a long way off ... if this is a dream, doing something stupid won't actually kill me ..." and I headed toward my tent, hoping to pack up a few things and beg someone for a ride. On the way, as I passed trees and Grimm's tents that had blocked my view, I saw four more tornadoes of different shapes and sizes and at different distances, to the west and southwest.

My group's camp and a few neighbouring ones were gone, the ground bare (with patches of dead grass to show where the tents had been, of course), apparently struck and packed in a hurry to get away from the twisters -- somehow I knew that none of the tornadoes had actually gotten that close yet -- but with enough care that the ground had been policed -- the only litter left behind being a single scrap of paper. With no car and no sign of my campmates, I stumbled toward the barn, where I found a bunch of people peering out at the approaching storms. I asked which direction we were being advised to go for safety, and someone shrugged as if to say, "it doesn't matter; we're surrounded". So we waited for the funnel clouds to draw nearer and give us a clue which direction to run. I said, "I guess this means the field battle will be delayed, huh?" and woke up.